Sweet swing of success: a combination of ability, preparation and adjustments helps Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols manhandle big-league pitching

Sporting News, The, June 23, 2003 by Matt Crossman

Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands. Pujols constantly changes his stance, but he never messes with his hands, at least not since they came to dominate how he swings the bat in the last three years. "It doesn't matter how weird of a stance I have, my hands are always in great position to throw it out to the ball," he says.

As he takes a short stride, his hands drop down and snap the bat through the strike zone. The bat head usually stays higher than his hands. The bat whips so hard it looks like a hose. "I want to try to catch the ball in front with my top hand," Pujols says. "If you have great hands, you don't have to worry about your lower body. You just want to relax and just react."

Cardinals hitting coach Mitchell Page says Pujols has the fastest hands in the game and uses them to hit the ball to all fields. "I think that's an adjustment he has made," says Dave Karaff, the Cardinals scout who signed Pujols out of a Kansas City community college four years ago. "He was pretty much a pull hitter when he was in high school and junior college."

Pujols, 23, does not have a classic home run swing. His homers often are line drives that scream over the wall. "He's not trying to hit home runs, trust me on that one," Page says. "He's trying to hit the ball hard."

Pujols says there are times when even he is surprised by how good his hands are. On May 18 against the Cubs, Mark Prior busted a pitch in on Pujols, who hit a tracer over the left field fence. "I wasn't even looking in there," he says. "I just threw my hands. That can tell me how good my hands are."

SEE A DIFFERENT GAME

Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands and is obsessive about preparing. He has a pregame routine that includes extensive batting-cage work and watching at least 40 minutes of video. He checks out his swing from the day before, and he checks the opposing pitcher he is about to face.

"What I try to do is see how he pitches, how his ball is moving, what he does with men in scoring position, early in the count, late in the count," Pujols says. "When I come out at 5 o'clock to hit B.P., I got my game plan ready. That's what I'm working on out there in B.P." The approach he takes at the plate depends on the pitcher, but there's one absolute: He never looks for inside fastballs. If he gets one, he trusts his hands to react to it.

In the first half last season, he hit only .280 as National League pitchers pounded him inside. That ended when he hit .335 with a league-leading 61 RBIs after the break.

Pujols' preparation never ends. When he's on deck, he gets almost completely behind the plate, a perfect place to pick up any late-breaking news about what a pitcher is doing that day. If Pujols sees something that contradicts his game plan, he's more than willing to change. It's not uncommon for Pujols and other Cardinals to run back to the video room of Busch Stadium during a game to get a look at their last at-bats.

Pujols has weaknesses. He's terribly slow, but he can't do much about that. He names two areas he needs to work on. One is staying back on off-speed pitches. The other is laying off the first pitch, although the numbers don't entirely back that up as a weakness. In Pujols' career, he's a .322 first-pitch hitter. This season, he's hitting .406 on the first pitch.

Lewis Shaw, a scout who analyzes players for the SPORTING NEWS, saw Pujols play in the minors and watched video of him in several series this season, looking for holes. There aren't many, but there are things pitchers can do to improve their chances of getting Pujols out (see photo essay, pages 16-17). But there is little margin for error because Pujols is an excellent mistake hitter. Shaw says, "If you hang it, he'll bang it."

Karaff says a friend of his in the business offered another suggestion to get Pujols out: "Throw the ball down the middle of the plate, and he'll pop it up." The friend was only half serious, but the point is obvious: Pujols covers the entire plate.

"If I left here and went to another ballclub," Page says, "and they said, 'how would you pitch Pujols?,' I'd say, 'Very carefully.'"

Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands, prepares obsessively and produces consistently by making adjustments. A swing is a symphony of the feet, legs, hips, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands and eyes. Just as a good conductor knows his musicians so well he hears when just one of them is flat, Pujols knows his swing so well he feels his own mistakes. "He's low-maintenance for me," Page says. "He knows exactly what he's doing wrong."

Within a game, and even within an at-bat, Pujols makes adjustments based on how fire pitcher is working him. When Pujols makes an out, he looks for pitchers to work the same spot again. When he faces a pitcher a second time in a game, his average is .418, compared with .398 the first time.

At least twice this season, Pujols has looked baffled in early at-bats only to homer later in the game against the same pitcher--once against Prior, another time against the Expos' Claudio Vargas on May 3. Vargas stymied Pujols in his first two appearances, which included a strikeout. In his third at-bat, Pujols worked a 3-1 count, looking for--and getting--a fastball middle-in. "If it would've been a fastball middle-out, I would've taken it," Pujols says. He hit a 452-footer.